Paper short abstract:

The presentation explores corporate tactics used by Pfizer, Gilead Science and Moderna to restrain alternative models of science and maximize the potential earning capacity of their ownership over specific technological assets in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Paper long abstract:

During the COVID-19 global pandemic, dynamics of assetization of health products (Roy 2020) transformed vaccine production and procurement into a game of vaccine nationalism, in which higher income countries pay more to jump the queue and obtain more vaccines to the detriment of other nations (Katz et al. 2021). Vaccine nationalism allowed drug companies to maximize their earning-capacity by coercing countries and impose prices or specific demands in exchange for their vaccine shipment, something some authors qualified as “state capture” – the concept of a corporation having the ability to manipulate the actions of the state (Gorodensky and Kohler 2022).

Many organizations argued in favor of making vaccines against pandemics a global public good (Hunter et al. 2022), but drug companies fought tooth and nail to preserve their earning-capacity through different forms of ownership over patents, clinical data, and technology.

Covid-19 created an opportunity for the emergence of a different model of health science based on public funding, open science and patent pooling. However, the model of proprietary science based on the assetization of health products in times of pandemics came out unscathed of this episode, to the detriment of vaccine equity, better efficiency in tackling the pandemic, and public trust in science.

The presentation explores corporate tactics used by Pfizer, Gilead Science and Moderna to restrain alternative models of science and maximize the potential earning capacity of their ownership over specific technological assets in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic.